In politics – as in war, love and a thousand other things – timing is everything. Cindy Sheehan’s timing has been impeccable.

Since Sheehan first set up her protest camp outside President Bush’s Texas ranch Aug. 6, 2005, the lives of 1,581 U.S. soldiers have been lost in Iraq, according to icasualties.org. Those are 1,581 lives she had hoped to save.

On Memorial Day, Sheehan bowed out of the struggle, deciding, in essence, that the life she needed most to save was her own.

Things had not been going well. Her health was poor, her finances a mess, her family relations strained and, worst of all, her spirit broken – by, it would seem, Congress’s recent failure to cut off funding for the war.

What had made Sheehan so potent a symbol of hope was, yes, the loss of her son Casey in Iraq in April 2004. But it was also her innocence. She was just a mom, like so many moms, an ingenue, not worldly wise and likely to say any damn thing that came into her head (such as how much she admired elected Venezuelan dictator Hugo Cha`vez).

In her “resignation” posting on Daily Kos, she expressed frustration that the system that produced this war “will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.”

Sheehan was not articulate – a quality she shared with the president she opposed. She was out of her depth – and also like Bush, didn’t seem to know it.

It didn’t matter. It was timing that made Sheehan. When she burst on the scene that summer, Bush was dropping in the polls, but still feeling confident enough about his prospects to head to his ranch for a month-long vacation.

Then came Sheehan, followed closely by Katrina and Rita. All insisted on being heard.

Sheehan was the tipping point, after which the Bush presidency never regained its footing.

Attempts by the administration’s defenders to demonize her – Fred Barnes of Fox News and the Weekly Standard called her a “crackpot”; Ann Coulter called her a “C-list celebrity trolling for a book deal or a reality show” – only won her allies. And it wasn’t just Democrats who rallied to her.

Matthew Dowd, a chief strategist of the Bush re-election victory in 2004, has since abandoned his support for the president, saying that a critical moment in his conversion was Bush’s refusal to meet with Sheehan that summer.

“I had finally come to the conclusion that maybe all these things along do add up. That it’s not the same, it’s not the person I thought,” he said of Bush.

But her novelty wore off, and as the situation grew more grave, the public discourse grew more somber. Many saw her as clownish, such as when she wore an anti-war T-shirt to Bush’s 2006 State of the Union speech and had to be removed from the House gallery.

As the list of aggrieved families grew, there were other stories to tell – notably that of Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, whose 27-year-old son, 1st Lt. Andrew Bacevich, was killed May 13 in Iraq.

The elder Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and graduate of West Point, was an authority on the conflict and a vocal opponent of the war from the beginning. “I know that my son did his best to serve our country,” he wrote recently in the Washington Post.

“Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same.”

Bacevich brought to the debate an articulate voice possessed of a gravitas Sheehan lacked.

There was a time when Sheehan personified our misgivings about the war. She represented the Mom faction in American politics, a third rail politicians touched at their peril. But time passed her by.

But in quitting the anti-war movement, Sheehan has provided another lesson in timing that others would do well to follow. It is a lesson – leaving when the world has had enough of you – that Bush has yet to learn.

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